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"The Brood of Bubastis" is a horror short story by Robert Bloch set in the Cthulhu Mythos. It was first published in the March 1937 issue of Weird Tales.
Synopsis[]
The American narrator travels to Cornwall, England, to visit his friend Malcolm Kent, who shares his interest in occultism. Kent makes the shocking announcement that, according to Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis and other sources, a group of Egyptian renegades once settled in Cornwall. Furthermore, he claims to have found a cave with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the countryside, which he invites the narrator to see. Only when they arrive at the entrance does Kent reveal that, according to Prinn, the Egyptian renegades were worshipers of the cat-goddess Bubastis, or Bast, exiled from their country for the atrocious sacrifices performed by their cult. The cave that Kent discovered accesses an underground temple built in honour of Bubastis, and he claims that the Priests of Bast experimented with the breeding of human / animal hybrids in an attempt to recreate their deity.
As he descends into the tunnels, guided by Kent, the narrator is horrified to find the mummified bodies of half-human, half-animal things, including some with horns, hooves, wings, and/or multiple heads. The walls are covered with sickening images of sacrifices and carnal rituals engaged in by the human priests and their creations alike. At last, they enter a large chamber with an altar covered in half-eaten bones, many of them recent and still clad in modern clothes. Kent reveals that after finding the cave, he has sacrificed several people to a monster that still inhabits these tunnels, a descendant of the priests' experiments known as the "Chewer of Corpses". The creature emerges while Kent and the narrator fight each other, and the latter manages to strike Kent and run away, but not before witnessing the Chewer of Corpses viciously devour its prey.
Since his return to New York, the narrator has been plagued by nightmares of his traumatic experience and a newly-acquired phobia of cats. He has written down the narrative as a suicide note, as well as to warn others away from the cave. As a final note, he reveals that the Chewer of Corpses is a 10 ft tall female humanoid with a feline head, created by the priests as a reincarnation of the goddess Bast herself.
Behind the Mythos[]
Despite being referred to as a "ghoul", the Chewer of Corpses doesn't seem to be related to the canine-headed Ghouls found elsewhere in the Mythos.